It Isn’t Over Until It’s Over

My silence here has been due to unexpectedly heavy needs in one of my business ventures.

Amid all the rest of what we are doing there, we are refining procedures for operating during pandemic lockdowns. Why? Because the UK government is obviously making a mistake by removing nearly all pandemic related restrictions when case rates are already soaring. For those who don’t see what the fuss is about, notice that recently appointed Health Minister Sajiv Javid now has COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated.

We prearranged flu jabs, privately, for all of our staff who want them. Our immune systems haven’t gotten much practice at fending off viruses of any kind for the past year and a half, so the flu vaccinations will help us as people go out and about more, sharing all sorts of viruses.

Our sales and delivery people will continue to use pandemic precautions when going to customers. So far most of my friends and most of the small business owners I know have decided similarly, planning not to relax precautions much (if at all).

This does not mean the bubble of people I associate with represents the entire country, and therein lies the rub.

Not everyone is willing to be cautious. Not everyone cares whether they make other people sick.

The UK’s so-called Freedom Day is tomorrow, but we already have a wave of the belly bug norovirus. That’s normally more of a problem in winter than in summer. Norovirus spreads via fomite transfer which makes it less easy to spread than coronavirus. Someone who is sick with it and has viral particles on their hands from inadequate handwashing touches a doorknob, a countertop, anything… and someone else later touches the same surface, then touches their mouth or touches food they consume. We saw this happen at a birthday party last week. The party was mostly outdoors with a fair amount of social distancing. Two people arrived and announced they weren’t feeling well, but wanted to see the birthday baby anyway. They didn’t get close to anyone except the birthday baby, whom they held. Now several people who were at the party are sick with norovirus. (We aren’t. We didn’t eat the party food.)

If this is how Britons behave when some restrictions and extra caution are still supposedly in place, the results of lifting most restrictions are not difficult to predict.

Technically some of UK government is now supposed to self-isolate after Javid exposed them to the virus. We have a pingdemic of people having to self-isolate and miss work after the test and trace system pings them with notification that they’ve been exposed to someone who is infected. It’s causing some businesses to be too short-staffed to operate. That isn’t a fault of the test and trace app. It’s because the virus is rampant again. Last week 1 in every 95 people is estimated to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. There are grumblings in government about the self-isolation rules, so it looks like quarantine and self-isolation rules will continue to be loosened. That will escalate the pandemic even more.

Scientists warn that what the UK is about do to will create an ideal breeding ground for new variants capable of evading the vaccines and essentially putting us back to square one. In our business planning, the worst case scenario includes seeing that happen. Lockdown would be necessary again.

In our business, we want to be ready. We want to be able to continue to serve customers safely. We need to try out adjustments to our procedures to make sure the changes are right, and then practice them to make sure we’ve got them down pat.

I hope other businesses are doing the same. The pandemic isn’t over when anybody says they want it to be. It’s over when we as a species get serious enough about it to deal with it more like we dealt with smallpox or polio.

In the meantime, some businesses are able to carry on (and some are essential) even during a pandemic flare-up. We’re one of them, so we have a responsibility to be prepared, and we are.